Politico reports:
Democrats on the House intelligence committee said Thursday that CIA officers broke the law in 2002 if they told Nancy Pelosi then that they had not yet engaged in waterboarding.
"If they make a false report, absolutely it's illegal," said Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "If they fail to make a report when they're obligated to that is also illegal - a violation of the National Security Act."
So Schiff wants terrorists to have the same rights as American soldiers ("nothing more and nothing less"), and he wants to prosecute the CIA for "misleading" Congress. The truly scary thing is that Pelosi is only marginally more responsible in this her attempts to goad the CIA. One of the hardest lessons for Republicans over the last eight years was that the CIA would do what it wanted when it wanted. It would leak damaging information as it pleased and to whatever effect it desired. An agency that was in the business of destabilizing foreign governments could easily use those same tricks against its own masters here in DC. Liberals think that Cheney had to gin up all this intelligence for the war in Iraq -- why on earth would he have to do that unless the CIA wouldn't give him what he wanted? Or how about the 2007 NIE, does the left imagine that this document was produced by a bunch of hopped-up neocons at CIA?
If the Democrats think they're going to win a fight against the CIA, we should wish them luck, but there is great irony here. As any Republican in the national security business will tell you, the CIA is not on our side--it's on its own side. These people actually were out to get the Bush administration. Democrats, out of sheer stupidity, are picking a fight they can't win.
